WHAT TO EXPECT FROM PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS
WHAT TO EXPECT FROM PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS
Written By Tracey Ricks Foster, Editorial Director of Washington Review & Commentary
In his State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama will endeavor to build upon the favorable momentum that his administration created late last year. With the repeal of ”Don’t ask, don’t tell,” the Obama administration gained a positive resurgence in the polls. For President Obama, the State of the Union speech is the blueprint from which the second half of his first term will be constructed and judged.
With the economy on the rebound according to the CBO, and an upward outlook on the unemployment situation in America, President Obama’s State of the Union Address will primarily focus on job creation and help for small businesses with tax incentives and health care insurance. November 2010 saw the unemployment rate drop to 9.4. The CBO forecasts the jobless rate will fall under nine percent by the end of 2011 and that by 2014, the rate will have fallen an additional four points and steady itself at five percent.
It is imperitive for President Obama to express within the State of the Union a willingness to work across political party lines to accomplish his main objectives, which are stabilizing the economy and reducing America’s debt ceiling. In his State of the Union, President Obama will stress the importance of cutting back in order to reduce the deficit, that by some estimates, is in the area of $70 trillion. Education and becoming globally competitve will be another focus of the President’s speech to America on Tuesday. With a national public school system surviving on a failing infrastructure, America’s educational system, which at one point decades ago was a benchmark for excellence around the world, is sinking and in dire need of an overhaul. President Obama will stress the need to bring education back to the forefront of America so that generations of children can fairly compete in a global world market.
President Obama’s speech will touch emphatically on the violent rhetoric that Washington politicians have engaged in for the past two years. Not pointing fingers at which political party is to blame for the violence in Tucson, Arizona earlier this month, the President will strongly make it clear that America was built on passionate discussion, freedom of speech, and healthy debate. However, President Obama will discourage inciteful and provocative language that could perpetuate violence. A bipartisanship commitment unilaterally between the White House and the legislative bodies, primarily the Republican majority of the House of Representatives, is the direction that President Obama will allude to in order for Washington to work for the American people.
The State of the Union Address will predictably feature many high notes. But if President Barack Obama seeks to remain in the White House beyond 2012, the tone of this speech will be the GPS to get him reelected.
The Washington Review & Commentary
Obama will echo Hamilton in the State of the Union
During the summer and fall of 1791, while Madison and Jefferson were building up the Republican resistance, Alexander Hamilton was hard at work in Philadelphia on a number of projects, the most absorbing of which was his Report on Manufactures. Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures went further than any other report in projecting the future of the United States and its place in the world economy.
Hamilton urged congress to promote manufacturing so that the United States could be “independent on foreign nations for military and other essential supplies.” In addition to national independence, manufacturing would provide a path to equality in the global market.
Hamilton foresaw mass immigration into the United States and a domestic population explosion, and understood that the diverse population of the future had the best chance of widespread prosperity through a diversification of labor.
He recommended specific policies to encourage manufactures; among them protective duties and prohibitions on rival imports, exemption of domestic manufactures from duties, and encouragement of “new inventions . . . particularly those, which relate to machinery.”
To Hamilton the absence of substantial manufacturing in the United States was a gaping hole of opportunity that desperately needed to be filled. Congress was not as enthusiastic.
The report was never put up to a vote. Although Hamilton’s proposals initially failed to receive support, virtually every recommendation was adopted by Congress in early 1792.